2008-12-07

Plexippus XPath released

The first version of Ivan
Shvedunov's Plexippus
XPath has been released, an implementation of XPath 1.0, written
entirely in Common Lisp.

Plexippus has been available from darcs for a few months now, and we
have had some early users (thanks for testing the code at that early
stage), but this is the first tarball release. New tarballs for cxml
and its other add-on projects are also available now, so that you don't
have to juggle with git, darcs, and CVS anymore.

Beta version: SBCL-only

Plexippus is well-tested on SBCL, but has not yet been ported to any
other Lisp implementation. That's why this release is declared as a
beta version.

(Ports to other Lisps mainly involve support code for non-trapping
floating-point arithmetic. Patches are welcome.)

The XPath protocol

For extensibility, Plexippus defines a protocol of generic functions
to implement the XPath data model, so any object model for XML can be
queried using Plexippus if it implements these generic functions.
Out-of-the-box, there is support
for cxml-STP (a DOM
alternative) and cxml's DOM.